Month: February 2009

Yes is More

[Image: The invitation. View larger!]

The Bjarke Ingels Group – BIG – are kicking off their first solo exhibition with a party next Friday, February 20, in Copenhagen. Check out the invitation, above, for more info.
They’ve got a lot to celebrate, so the mood should hopefully be high. For instance:

“Playful,” “controversial,” “cheeky,” “innovative” and “provocative” are just some of the terms used to describe BIG. Headed by Bjarke Ingels, this architectural company has in the space of a few years created prize-winning projects, a long list of innovative buildings and an international reputation, as well as taking an active part in current debates in society. Starting out from a vision aiming to free architecture from tired clichés, choosing instead to see modern life as an inspiring challenge, BIG has made a major contribution to the renewal of the Danish architectural tradition.

The exhibition itself opens on the 21st. (Somebody fly me over, please!)

Pushkin Park

[Image: A moldy sofa, otherwise unrelated to this post, photographed by Flickr user melinnis].

Russian scientists have begun testing blood stains on the sofa where novelist Alexander Pushkin is rumored to have died, in order to determine if those stains might have come from Pushkin himself.
At least two things interest me here:

1) It’s the forensic sciences applied to antique furniture in order to find the otherwise undetectable remains of a dead Russian novelist. One might even say residue here, not remains at all; it is the barest of traces. Suddenly, though, it’s as if those old stuffed sofas, fading carpets, and tables of hand-worn wood in obsolete interiors around the world have been transformed into a kind of archaeological site, in which the chemical traces of literary history might yet be discovered. The sofa is Pushkin’s Calvary, if you will – a chemical reliquary. Furniture becomes a kind of hematological Stargate into literature’s mortal past. Who else might they find in there? You go around the world performing genetic tests on antique furniture to see which novelists ever used it – traces of Sebald, Hemingway, Tolstoy.

2) Two words: Pushkin Park. We clone Pushkin and start a theme park. Like a thousand Mini-Me‘s well-versed in storycraft, Pushkin – one man distributed through a thousand bodies – wanders the artificial landscape, and like some strange Greek myth wed with Antiques Roadshow, he tells the crowds, “I sprung forth, fully formed, from a sofa…” And there begins a tale for stunned tourists.

(Via the Guardian).

Worship the Glitch

[Image: The revised tower, via the Las Vegas Sun].

A new boutique hotel in Las Vegas designed by architect Norman Foster – who is soon to lose his seat in the House of Lords after becoming a Swiss citizen to avoid paying taxes – is being cut almost in half due to a construction error: “15 floors of wrongly installed rebar.”
The hotel, called the Harmon, was meant to stand at 49 stories; it will now reach a mere 28.
“It’s still unclear how the Harmon will be capped,” the Las Vegas Sun reports, “and what reengineering will be required for such infrastructure elements as elevators and vents. If the Harmon’s exterior isn’t significantly redesigned, it risks looking unmistakably out of proportion. Think 28 oz. of tomatoes squished into a 16 oz. can.”
Midway through becoming what you were meant to be, an unanticipated internal flaw forces you to become something else entirely – for good or for bad, that remains to be seen.

(Via Archinect).

Agricultural Sabotage

A Welsh farmer has become an “agricultural saboteur” by “secretly planting and harvesting genetically modified varieties of maize and feeding them to local sheep and cattle.” This undercuts Wales’s ability to claim that it is a GM-free nation.

An unrepentant Harrington [the farmer in question] said he had resorted to the secret planting after the Welsh assembly, which voted unanimously for GM-free status in 2000, refused to have any meaningful discussions over its policy. He said: “Out of frustration I went and bought some varieties of maize bred to be resistant to a pest called the European corn borer and which are grown widely in Spain, France, Germany and the Czech Republic.”
The varieties he chose were on the EU common variety list, and as such it is legal to grow them anywhere in Europe.

The ease with which this sort of thing could happen makes it obvious that the genetic purity of a nation’s agricultural supply cannot be rigorously policed.

[Image: “Johnny Apple Sandal” by Lift].

Briefly, I’m reminded of a design project from nearly half a decade ago called “Johnny Apple Sandal,” where the soles of a pair of sandals had different varieties of wildflower seeds embedded in their plastic; as your soles wore down, the seeds were released – theoretically going on to form new landscapes. A kind of pedestrian agronomy.
But what a perfect tool for agricultural smuggling! You load up your sandals with genetically modified seeds, fly to Wales, and go for a long hikes in the Brecon Beacons. Soon enough, you’ve contaminated the hills with illegal plants, or forms of life subject to government regulation.
In any case, I also can’t imagine that this is the only example of such a thing; this farmer just seems like the only one who was caught. It’s not hard to speculate that there are what might be called – with no small amount of irony – protest gardens full of genetically modified plants sprouting in secret across the world.
What strange cultivations might we yet stumble upon in some unofficial garden in the woods?

(Thanks, Alex, for the Welsh farmer article!)

The Boom is Over

[Image: By David Gray for Reuters, via The New York Times].

Amongst many, many signs that the building boom has come to an end, from gridlocks of cars abandoned at the Dubai airport by fleeing workers to massive holes in the urban surface of Chicago, to entire architectural firms going out of business, to delayed towers and theme parks on pause, none seem quite as explicitly apocalyptic as the sight of OMA’s CCTV complex – that is, the part of it known as TVCC, containing a luxury hotel – roaring with flames.

[Image: By Andy Wong for the Associated Press, via The New York Times].

The boom ended long ago, but its icon are now on fire.

(Note some updates on this story in the comments thread, below).

Park’s Parks

[Image: “Daechi Dong,” a photo by Hosang Park, from his series A Square].

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

Korean photographer Hosang Park‘s series A Square consists of bird’s-eye views of the small, over-landscaped parks that seem to accompany modern apartment towers all over the world. As Park explains, these “parks” are too small to serve their ostensible purpose: as open space for recreation and places “to make discussions or take a rest.” In the UK and US, they are included in new construction projects to fulfill the letter of planning regulations (if not the spirit) – a token band-aid of “nature” applied to high-density development. As Park points out, their presence in Korea is both a reassurance and an investment: the trees, paths, and water features, no matter how artificial, push up property prices by providing an implicit guarantee of “the environmental benefits of a place where they belong.”

[Images: “Howon Dong” and “Sinbong Dong 2,” photos by Hosang Park, from his series A Square].

Park’s parks are photographed from above – which seems, in fact, to be the view for which they were designed. As two-dimensional compositions of curved paths, colored paving, and rhythmically spaced rocks or trees, they resemble pleasing, if sterile, designs for wrapping paper or Ikea rugs. Tellingly, they are also completely empty. Park explains that he took these photos while he was living on the 13th floor of Jugong Apartment in Chang-dong, Seoul. He and his hundreds of neighbors experienced their park as a a patch of eye candy – visual respite from the concrete and tarmac of their surroundings. Its cornucopia of amenities – climbing frames, fountains, seesaws and swing sets, pagodas, grass, ornamental rocks, meandering paths, trees and flower beds, benches, ponds, basketball courts… even public art – are crammed together as visual shorthand for endless leisure. They are landscape as signage, a placeholder for the possibilities of a park.

[Images: “Samsung Dong” and “Uman Dong,” photos by Hosang Park, from his series A Square].

But could we then imagine that Korea’s urban landscape subcontractors have been applying the lessons of graphic design to their creations, as if to a poster or magazine spread? The spaces between ornamental planters are carefully kerned, the edges of flower beds masterfully shaped through ragging to create an “organic” appearance – each element ordered and constrained by a Tschicholdian grid. Or perhaps these parks are the work of one visionary landscape designer, a passionate disciple of Edward Tufte. His goal is the ultimate park infographic, and he diligently recombines ponds, benches, and pagodas to achieve ever greater data density that allow for ever more sophisticated landscape analyses. The published results will become the canonical park design text for a generation, changing public policy as effectively as John Snow’s landmark cholera outbreak map of London once did.

[Image: “Sindorim Dong” by Hosang Park, from his series A Square].

Finally, I’m reminded of the Royal Horticultural Society’s model gardens at Wisley. Wisley, an otherwise unremarkable village in Surrey, is home to an educational garden, meant to fulfill the Society’s remit “to show to the public the best kinds of plants to grow.” Behind the scenes at Wisley, fields are devoted to trialling difficult, delicate, or entirely new kinds of flowers, vegetables, and fruit for “garden or ornamental use.” Teams of horticulturists partner with botanists, entomologists, and pathologists to determine the correct details, cultivation, and advice for each group of plants, with high performing plants winning an Award of Garden Merit (AGM) – the gardening equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal.

[Images: “Jangan Dong” and “Sinbong Dong,” photos by Hosang Park, from his series A Square].

AGM-winning plants are then arranged in model gardens at Wisley, to which the public is invited to learn the ideal varietals, patterns, and conditions for a garden on chalky soil, say, or a poorly drained lot. These model gardens are not actually intended to be the private back yards they resemble; instead they are part-instruction manual, part-shop window, part prototype of future, unrealized landscapes elsewhere. Like Park’s parks, they are primarily designed to be read, rather than sensed or experienced; and they are deliberately exhaustive in their approach, with each rather small plot landscaped to show all appropriate elements of, for instance, a sub-alpine rock garden. Which leads me to wonder if Park’s photos have inadvertently documented an experimental array of urban test gardens, new spatial formats for high-density leisure in their beta phase.

(Hosang Park’s work discovered via Flavorwire. Earlier posts by Nicola Twilley include Dark Sky Park and Zones of Exclusion).

Get Set

[Image: Photo by soupandtea].

Catching up on some news, emails, and links sent in over the past few weeks, I was amused to see that financially hard-hit homeowners in the Los Angeles area have begun temporarily renting out their houses as filming locations for TV commercials and pornos.
One man in Burbank, unable to sell his house for its asking price and having to compensate for a loss of rental income, “posted an Internet notice that the property, which has an eight-person hot tub, was available to the adult-film industry, which he had heard pays as much as $5,000 a day. A few months ago, ‘I probably would’ve said, “You want to do what in here?”‘ he said. ‘That’s reserved for me and the missus.'”
Apparently, “Income from residential filming for fewer than 15 days a year isn’t subject to federal taxes,” so there might yet be something of a boom in short-term film sites around the city, a distributed micro-Hollywood of economically depressed domestic space.

(Thanks, Javier!)

Watermarks

Last night in Bristol, England, marked the start of Chris Bodle’s Watermarks Project. For the next week, Bodle will be projecting onto the facades of buildings throughout Bristol estimated future high-tide marks should the entire Greenland ice cap melt.

[Image: From Chris Bodle’s Watermarks Project].

The idea is brilliant; I love the idea of mapping the future earth onto the earth of the present, of overlaying onto our present geography the virtual presence of a geography yet to come.

In many ways, I’d even say that this project can be divorced from its immediate context of climate change science and applied to any number of terrestrial processes, from the projected future and the hypothesized past. Whether mapping lost lakes of a different era or tracing the edges of disappeared lagoons that still haunt the streets of San Francisco – or reminding urbanites of the sport-fishing possibilities beneath Manhattan – we are alive within laminations we will never fully map or comprehend.

And these geographic superimpositions needn’t all by hydrological: the constant erasures and revisions of the earth through plate tectonics represent an unlimited supply of counter-landscapes we might explore.

I’m reminded of John McPhee’s fantastic book Assembling California – part of his equally great collection Annals of the Former World. There, McPhee describes how entire “Newfoundlands, Madagascars, New Zealands, Sumatras, [and] Japans” have all come together, rammed into place, one into the other over millions of years, to form what we now call California. Walking around Los Angeles, or through the coastal hills of Bug Sur, you’re not walking on unified ground at all, then, but across “the metamorphosed remains of what had once been an island arc.”

The ground here is all wandering, nomadic wreckage, only it’s been temporarily “consolidated as California,” McPhee writes.

So could all those old islands be flagged, their mutated and compressed remains – sheer gravel, lone hillsides, folded slopes, and whole mountain ranges – marked out with surveyors’ tape? The Archipelago Project. You cross and recross lost geographies made visible through an artist’s intervention – or follow a new state hiking path that meanders around the edges of minor fault lines yet to open.

[Image: From Chris Bodle’s Watermarks Project].

In any case, projecting the earth’s future oceans onto a contemporary cityscape is an almost unbelievably stimulating idea.

These are the data points of a world yet to come, you might say, made visible here on the fronts of a hundred buildings – a future or alternative version of the earth coming into focus all around us.

(Via the RSA’s Arts & Ecology site, thanks to Nicky!)

Postopolis! LA

It still feels like Postopolis! only just happened, though it’s been nearly two years. We’ve all moved on to new cities or we’ve had kids; books have been written; jobs have changed; the United States has a new president; the landscape of architecture and design websites continues to mutate, and… we’ve thus decided that it’s time to do another one.
And we’re doing it in Los Angeles.

[Image: Logo by Joe Alterio].

From Tuesday, March 31, to Saturday, April 4, 2009, from 5-11pm each day, in a location to be confirmed very soon, we’re bringing art, architecture, music, film, design, planning, politics, sci-fi, special effects, geology, history, lost rivers, futurism, and archaeology to Los Angeles, that city of tar pits and movie stars, of beaches, landslides, and mountain lion attacks, of universities and parking lots, of real estate speculation and individualized automotive fractality, city of black magic, mass murder, and abandoned swimming pools, military simulation labs, Die Hard and plate tectonics. City of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, of ecologies, gravel pits, and infrastructure.
So who’s involved?

—David Basulto from Plataforma Arquitectura and ArchDaily (Santiago, Chile)
—Jace Clayton from Mudd Up! (New York City, USA)
—Régine Debatty from we make money not art (Europe)
—Bryan Finoki from Subtopia (San Francisco, USA)
—Dan Hill from City of Sound (Sydney, Australia)
—Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG (San Francisco, USA)

The first Postopolis! was hosted in the uniquely awesome perforated space of the Storefront for Art and Architecture; it was a collaboration between Inhabitat, Subtopia, City of Sound, and BLDGBLOG; and it was an exhilarating and exhausting five days’ worth of back-to-back interviews, presentations, lectures, panel discussions, slideshows, short film screenings, roundtable discussions, slightly surreal international phone calls, and so on.
This time it will be all that plus more art, film, and music, a larger international scope, hopefully several Spanish-language events and lectures, hopefully at least one minor earthquake, and just a short drive west to views of the Pacific Ocean.
We’ll be announcing the actual speakers and all other subsidiary events soon; for now, check out the Postopolis! LA page over at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, bookmark the other blogs involved in planning all this, and watch out for more info coming soon!
And each night will be free and open to the public, and all indications are that this thing will be as centrally located as something can be in Los Angeles. So come by at any point: from 5pm to 11pm each night.
Postopolis! LA is sponsored by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and ForYourArt, and it will be part of Los Angeles Art Weekend.